Crunchpad is Alive and Kicking, Based on Sponsorship

We’ve got fresh info about the long awaited Crunchpad, thanks to the Gilmor Gang videocast, that you can watch after the break. The speakers are Mike Arrington, P. Rangaswami, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks and Saul Hansell, focusing on the iPhone and Droid War, but also about the Crunchpad tablet.

Thanks to this discussion we learn that the device will be retailing for “something between $300 and $400”, web-only and it’ll rely on soft revenue and sponsorships. This could mean that the tablet will be ad-supported, but without damaging the user experience. Mike Arrington probably expects the Crunchpad to sell quite well, but considering the price of an Archos Android tablet and that of the iPod Touch, it’ll be hard to compete on the market of “couch web surfers”.

Nokia is also playing this game right now, via its new devices running Maemo, but we digress. The Crunchpad will be sporting an Atom CPU and it’ll have a seemingly decent price tag, unless the Apple Tablet comes along and makes a better offer. Here’s the video of the Gilmor Gang: